A Closer Look At Red Hat's Plymouth

The details plug-in displays the boot messages on the screen instead of a splash screen. Instead of permanently switching to this plug-in, by hitting the escape key from within a splash plug-in should fallback to these boot messages, which are nicely displayed at the system's native resolution.

Lastly, if you missed the Spinfinity plug-in from our earlier article, here it is below.

That about covers what there is to talk about with Plymouth. Plymouth provides a very nice graphical boot process on Fedora that is aided by the emerging kernel-based mode-setting support. Ultimately, Plymouth should work its way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux once it and KMS have both been stabilized. It would also be nice to see Plymouth (or some adaptation of it) supported by other Linux distributions. Having Plymouth will not lead Linux to having a greater market-share, but it's darn nice to look at, allows extensive customization abilities, provides a flicker-free experience, and is certainly more efficient than RHGB where it had relied upon an X Server.